The Longevity Dividend

Make 70-year-olds feel young, and you keep them around longer.

Social Security is a financial disaster waiting to happen. State-funded pension plans are, for the most part, in even worse shape. Private pensions aren't looking so hot, either. A site that tracks these problems, PensionTsunami.com, is a steady gush of bad news.

One solution is retiring later. This is proposed, without much conviction, by budgeters as a fix for Social Security. It is self-imposed as a necessity by people planning to live off their 401(k)s. It makes sense. When 74-year-old Otto von Bismarck set the first retirement age at 70 (though later lowered to 65) it was based on the cynical knowledge that far more voters hoped to reach that advanced age than would actually do so. Nowadays, on the other hand, when someone dies at 70 the reaction is likely to be "So young!"

The original justification for retirement was that by the time people reached a certain age, they were worn out and used up and deserved a few years of dignified leisure in their decline. But that idea is already changing as lives extend, and medical developments on the horizon suggest that it might change a lot more. Could we save our troubled pension systems by developing ways to keep people healthy, and working, much longer?

Centenarians--those over 100 years in age--are a fast-growing demographic worldwide. The U.S. has 84,000 of them, more than any other country; Japan is second with 30,000. This has led some to speak of a "longevity revolution." But while people are, in fact, living longer and healthier lives with help from better nutrition and medical care, living past 100 is still largely the product of genetics. You're much more likely to live that long if someone in your family has already done so.

Medicine could do more. As gerontological scientists begin to understand the mechanisms that permit long life, others are working on drugs that can extend those benefits, and more, to those of us who are not blessed with age-resistant genes. Resveratrol, the component in red wine that is supposedly behind its beneficial effects, activates a gene called SIRT-1. Normally activated by near-starvation, SIRT-1 extends life by, among other things, reducing the amount of intracellular junk (called lipofuscin) that accumulates from metabolism. Much more potent versions of this compound are now being tested.
Sirtris Pharmaceuticals
, which is working on a powerful synthetic SIRT-1 activator, was recently bought by GlaxoSmithkline for $720 million.

Efforts even more ambitious than this are in the works. University of Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey talks about something he calls Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, whereby aging might be stopped or even reversed. Aging, he says, is not some mysterious supernatural process, any more than wear and tear on your car. Fixing aging isn't any more mysterious than fixing your car. It's all about preventing and repairing cellular damage.

How far this might take us is unclear. Scientists like De Grey, or inventor Ray Kurzweil, think that the very notion of aging may become obsolete by century's end. I'm all for that.

But even much more modest progress--extending healthy middle age from 60 to, say, 80--would permit significant shifts in retirement ages and allow for a longevity dividend that could go a long way toward preventing the looming pension meltdown. Greater progress might make the problem go away entirely. So perhaps it would make sense to steer some of the federal money currently going to research on treating the diseases of old age--an approach that leads to older, but frailer, people who are a drain on public resources and whose quality of life is iffy--to research on slowing or reversing the damage that aging does, leading to healthier old people who can work (and pay taxes) longer, while feeling better and enjoying life more.

I suppose some people would regard this as a gyp, preferring an earlier, if sicklier, retirement to working longer and feeling better. But I suspect that most people (that is, most voters) would rather retire later while staying "younger" longer. Seems like there's an opportunity here for a politician who's willing to get ahead of the curve.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, editor of Instapundit.com, is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and host of Washington Watch on PJTV.com.